Former Penn State quarterback and Assistant Coach Mike McQueary was Sexually Abused: Report

Mike McQueary, the former Penn State quarterback and Nittany Lions assistant football coach who was a key prosecution witness in Jerry Sandusky’s criminal trial, confided to players that he was a victim of sexual abuse, according to a new ESPN The Magazine report. According to the report, it was during a meeting with PSU football receivers and tight ends on Nov. 7, 2011 — three days after prosecutors released a damning grand jury presentment outlining Sandusky’s sexual abuse of eight boys over a 15-year period — that the then-Nittany Lions receivers coach, McQueary, told the players that he too had been sexually abused when he was a boy. The report cites two players who were present at the meeting.

McQueary, 39, is expected to be a crucial prosecution witness in the trial of three ex-PSU administrators ­­– former athletic director Tim Curley, former president Graham Spanier and former vice president Gary Schultz — accused of covering up Sandusky’s years-long sexual abuse. Their trial is scheduled to begin later in 2014, and all three have pleaded not guilty.McQueary broke down in tears during the 2011 confession in front of his players, the ESPN report says, and one of the players present, Patrick Flanagan, said in the ESPN report that McQueary expressed regret that he hadn’t done more to stop a sexual assault by Sandusky in 2001 that McQueary has testified he witnessed.

“He said he had some regret that he didn’t stop it,” Flanagan says in the ESPN report. “We didn’t want to see someone we looked up to get emotional. It was heartbreaking for all of us. We weren’t sure who to believe. You see an older man crying, someone you looked up to. It’s sad.”

McQueary testified under oath several times that he saw Sandusky, the long-time PSU coach under the late Joe Paterno, sodomizing a boy in the showers of a campus athletic building in February of 2001. Sandusky was convicted in June of 2012 of 45 counts of sexual abuse of 10 young boys and is serving a prison sentence of no less than 30 years and no more than 60 years.

McQueary did not confirm to ESPN that he was an abuse victim, and a Daily News call to his attorney, Tim Fleming, was not returned. The ESPN report says that according to several of McQueary’s classmates and teammates, he “developed a compulsive gambling habit at Penn State,” including betting on PSU football games.According to the ESPN report, McQueary is currently unemployed. He filed a $4 million whistleblower lawsuit against the university after he wasn’t retained in 2012. Paterno was fired from his long-time coaching post after Sandusky was charged. Paterno was never implicated in the scandal, and he died on Jan. 22, 2012.NY Daily News, Christian Red